During spring break, I brought some work home with me to try it out — poems, an English essay, and a "Writer’s Laboratory" response paper to produce while I sat at home, watched Pretty Little Liars, and played with my dog. Frankly, the last thing I wanted to do was homework. Enter The Most Dangerous Writing App. It allows you to set aside a block of time — from five to 60 minutes — to continuously work. That way, you can chip away at your projects for five minutes at a time, similar to interval training on a treadmill. If you stop typing for five seconds within your allotted time, everything you’ve written disappears. I tried it out for myself, using an English paper I had been putting off for a few days.

My paper started with a quote from Jennifer Egan’s "Black Box," and I “died” in the app three times trying to copy it over. Note to self: skip any and all quotes. You’re going for speed, not accuracy. While I was able to continuously type for the five minutes (a testament to endurance), I did have a Dory moment and wrote “Just keep typing, just keep typing…” for the sake of getting something down on the page. There was something about the app's urgency that made me work harder to get something — anything — onto paper, and even though I was afraid of losing my work, the words came out almost as quickly as I thought of them, like any good writing session.

But here’s the problem: the words weren’t particularly good. The app forces users to prioritize quantity over quality, so if you’re working on a paper that will receive a grade (or anything that actually needs to be good), you probably want to focus on quality. Ultimately, I couldn’t use anything I wrote on the app in my final draft, so I needed to redo the entire introduction paragraph in Microsoft Word. While it did get my brain working and my fingers moving, it ended up making me less — not more — productive, because after I was done, I had to start over.

One could argue that you could use the app to bang out sections of an essay in digestible chunks, and Copy/Paste those chunks into Microsoft Word as you go. That’s all fine and dandy, and I’m sure it works for some people — but as someone who writes a lot, I can tell you there’s nothing more tragic than losing all your work, and the Most Dangerous Writing App is too risky for someone who values every word they write.